


Root and Bough and Branch and Leaf

by Gileonnen



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Calendrical Heresy, Canon-Typical Body Horror, Gen, Heraldic Symbolism as Intimidation Tactic, Lingering Ghosts, Nascent Free Will, The Delicate Dance of Military Protocol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 10:11:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13051908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: When Cheris and Khiruev discover a scoutmoth drifting in space, they immediately suspect a trap. Instead, though, they find a message of hope.





	Root and Bough and Branch and Leaf

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ExtraPenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/gifts).



> Many thanks to my wonderful beta, Sath! Any remaining errors are mine.

Three months after the Aerie fell, by the new calendar, they found the scoutmoth drifting in space. Primary engine power was off, and although life support seemed functional, there were no human life signs discernible. "Probably a trap," said Brezan to general agreement.

Cheris nodded, but as her gaze tracked the shimmering black surface of the little moth, she began to calculate its trajectory against the region's calendrical drift. With no one left on board to perform the remembrances, the craft probably had a negligible value as a spike for the hexarchate calendar, but it might still be dragging some new exotic effect in its wake.

At her side, Khiruev coughed hard. No one else on the bridge looked up. They had learned that, unless Cheris chose to respond to Khiruev's condition, there was nothing to be said about it.

"You'll want to look at this, sir," said the woman at Scan. Cheris set her mental calculations to one side and glanced over at the screen. It pulsed with constellations of oxygen and carbon, iron twining slowly in vines over inert flesh. And beneath it all, something else, familiar like the ugly weight of undigested food in one's stomach.

That arrangement of organic forms into an amalgam both more and less than the sum of its parts. The welding together of plant and animal, beast and man, stone and bone.

The Hafn geese had looked like that in scan.

"Bring it in," said Cheris. "It's not a trap. It's a message."

When the _Hierarchy of Feasts_ had been a Kel ship, a team of specialists would have scoured the scoutmoth and prepared a full report for Cheris's perusal. She would have skimmed it with Khiruev, possibly with Brezan and Muris and the woman from Doctrine, and together they would have digested the scoutmoth's message as sterile data.

Even now, there were risks to ignoring the chain of command. Specialists took pride in their work. Ordinary soldiers got uncomfortable. The junior officers, the ones Cheris relied on to get most of the administration done, resented protocol breaches more than anyone.

But even so, it was important to remind people sometimes that protocol was a choice now.

Khiruev glanced up at Cheris as she stood, then rose to follow her to the docking bay. All around them, the voidmoth reconfigured to make their path an unobstructed line. Enameled walls shifted like the segments of an enormous beetle, each joint feathered with inlaid ashhawk wings.

Cheris still wasn't sure how she felt about the inlays. It was hard enough for most of their crew to accept that this was no longer a Kel ship without seeing the ashhawk emblem everywhere they turned. But despite Brezan's continued insistence that they paint the walls plain white, she wasn't sure it would be any easier to see an absence where the ashhawk had once been.

Belief required an object, and they had no symbol to offer yet but the blood-red Deuce of Gears.

The docking bay was still bitterly cold from its brief contact with empty space, but the scoutmoth itself was colder. The moisture in the room condensed on its smooth black surface in traceries of ice like ferns and twining vines. 

At a word from Cheris, a pair of servitors came to inspect the scoutmoth. One, a many-jointed serpentform, inserted itself into the slight well where a sensor array had been deployed; the other, a deltaform, scanned the moth for hidden triggers and tripwires. It hummed and flashed white and red as it detected and sequestered a single exposed filament of explosive anapest wire.

"They meant for us to find that," Khiruev muttered. "Too make us feel as though we'd accomplished something."

 _A distraction? No,_ Cheris decided. _Emotional priming. They wanted us to go in overconfident. They think that whatever they have inside will cut us down._

The door to the scoutmoth slid open with scarcely a hiss. The serpentform emerged and informed Cheris that the air within was breathable, the calendar apparently stable, the walkways empty of mechanical traps.

"After you," said Khiruev.

Thanking the servitors, Cheris stepped into the ringing, icy emptiness of the moth. The tick of her analog watch echoed from every polished surface.

A scoutmoth like this one was only big enough for three people, and from the looks of it, this moth had only held one. All three bunks were immaculate, every corner precise. Two were empty of personal effects. Beneath the blankets of the third bunk, though, Cheris saw a small, circular lump. She peeled back blanket and sheet to reveal a bracelet of jade and abalone. Synthetic, she thought, but very good replicas. They absorbed the heat of her hand the way stone and shell ought to. One bead was carved with a word in a language Cheris had never seen before.

There was no excess food in the supply cabinets. Every canister had been meticulously cleaned. _Or put here clean,_ thought Cheris. If this was a message, every part of it had probably been designed. The jars for pickled cabbage might mean the passenger had been Kel, or they might only mean that some cynical Andan had thought Cheris would be moved by the thought of a Kel all alone.

In the new calendar, a soldier this completely isolated wouldn't even have had the security of formation instinct to keep her from second-guessing herself. Even when she'd been most alone, she'd still had Jedao at the back of her mind.

Which was no doubt exactly what she was supposed to be thinking about.

The faint whisper of rushing air made Cheris look up from the cabinet. She followed the sound to the bridge and found Khiruev poised in the entryway with one hand on the doorframe.

Even before Cheris peered over her shoulder, she could smell what had made Khiruev pause.

In the pilot's chair lay a woman's body wrapped in a Kel's black and gold dress uniform. From every still artery, from the palms of her hands and the soles of her bare feet, a riot of kniferoses bloomed. Their carrion-sweet scent drifted out through the door in a cloud, thick and heavy enough to be palpable.

To one side of the woman, a wolf's body rested with its head on its paws. To the other, a ray floated lifeless in a stone-lined pool. In the woman's lap, a hawk rested with its head tucked beneath its wing. As Khiruev stepped over the lip of the door and into the bridge, a dozen black moths rose from the bodies in a cloud. They and the roses were the only things that had been left alive.

"Was she anyone you knew?" Cheris asked. Her hand found Khiruev's shoulder.

"Only by reputation, but hers is immaculate," Khiruev answered. "I almost attended a dinner with her once, but heresy broke out in the Tangled Pearls, and her swarm was called up. This is General Izaid of _Reaps the Gale_. A good soldier."

"What would she have done, when she had the choice? Clung to formation instinct, or broken with it?"

"If you'd asked me a few years ago, I'd have said she'd never turn crashhawk. Formation instinct carved on her bones. But you gave her a third option. Hard to say if she would have taken it." Khiruev knelt at Izaid's side, beside the ray's low pool. At first, Cheris thought that Khiruev would take Izaid's hand and press it--it was the kind of compassionate thing that she did sometimes, the consideration that still made Cheris's chest ache with hope--but instead, she inspected the splices where the roses met the flesh. "It's the same as the geese," she said eventually. "The same technique, adapted for the hexarchate's calendar. "

Cheris came to join her, although the overpowering stench of roses threatened to choke her. "For our calendar, if she was willing. That's the question: was this a new exotic? Or just torture?" The new calendar had drawn a bright line of formulae between them, but even that line didn't stop the old guard from torturing people.

The old calendar hadn't only been held in place by equations and remembrances. It had relied on the faith of an empire under martial law, and a burst of manifestos and algorithms couldn't undo millennia of plain fear. Even given their will, some people would choose the hexarchate--and they might not even realize they'd made a choice.

"Whether it's an exotic or not, you were right to call it a message. The symbols are clear enough. Even after what Mikodez did to the hexarchs, even without Kel Command, the factions plan to keep bringing the fight to us. I'd lay good money on the Andan and the Nirai for this display. Overconfident pricks."

Cheris recalled the last known position of _Reaps the Gale_. It had been too far from the Aerie to be brought in for defense, but not too far not to have been pressed to service shortly after it fell. Izaid might even have been in the running for a reorganized Kel Command, if she'd had the ambition. Ravens knew, the Kel were really fucking short on generals now.

Khiruev straightened, only a faint hitch in the movement to betray the icy pain of it. "For people like Izaid, there was no real homeland but the hexarchate. If the Andan wanted to copy the Hafn technique, what could they do? She wasn't Mwennin or Khaigar. She was Kel. That was the home they could feed into her: the factions and their politics. So what is the message here? What are we supposed to understand?"

Cheris looked down at General Izaid and tried to imagine who she'd been, before the fallen hexarchate had seeded her with roses. She let herself picture prosperous marriages, successful campaigns in the Tangled Pearls and the Whispering Marches, a particular skill at dueling and pattern-tiles that never translated to jeng-zai. Planetside campaigns under strange suns that had worn her skin to leather.

She'd had no people but the hexarchate, Khiruev had said, and to restore it, she would have made herself formation fodder. She wouldn't even have hesitated. No true Kel would. She would have dosed herself with sleeping drugs and sat herself down in the pilot's seat, letting the roses root in her bones. The perfect suicide hawk.

But someone had tucked that bracelet beneath the blanket like a secret. Had it been Izaid? Had it been whoever had wound her with flowers and let moths rest on her eyes?

Cheris turned the bracelet over in her hand. It was exactly the right size to slip over Izaid's hand. A line of lighter skin lay across her pulsepoint, perfectly concealed beneath a kniferose leaf.

"The message that the hexarchate wanted to send is: _You are as alien to us now as the Hafn. If you want to be peoples, to tie yourself to your planets and your provincial customs the way they do, you'll become no more than geese. We will use you up._ "

She brushed aside the roses to fasten the bracelet around Izaid's wrist. "And the message Izaid sent was, _I had a people, too. And even though I was the perfect Kel, I never forgot them. Neither should you._ She took the third way, after all."

"It probably says something about the state of the Kel, that a general with a choice let them do this to her. And that's part of her message, too," said Khiruev. "What are Kel, without formation instinct? People who have been taught how to die, waiting for someone to tell them where and when. The hexarchate has never been short on people ready to give that order."

"People who have been taught how to serve," Cheris countered. "Looking for a cause worth serving."

"She thought our cause was worth serving. And she died to tell us that. She wanted us to make a play for the Kel, and she thought we had a decent chance of winning them over." Khiruev's hand closed over Cheris's. Her fingertips were cold, but as she pressed harder, Cheris felt warmth near the bone. "Someone has to take care of our hawks. If it isn't us, it will be someone else."

 _This is still a trap_ , said that voice in Cheris that was no longer Jedao's. _It didn't stop being a trap because it didn't explode in your face. You risk everything you've built if you go chasing hawks now._

She looked up at Khiruev, with her trim streak of white hair and her clear, kind eyes. The kind of woman who wrote condolence letters that she'd never be permitted to send; who fixed things just because they were broken.

Cheris turned her hand in Khiruev's and squeezed back. "We're fighting a war. We're going to need soldiers."

Together, they left the moth and its messages behind.


End file.
